The
child waked and began to whine and cry a little in that strange,
lonely place, and after a few minutes, perhaps to quiet it, they went
on their way. Near the foot of the hill was a brook, swollen by the
autumn rains; it made a loud noise in the quiet pasture, as if it were
crying out against a wrong or some sad memory. The woman went toward
it at first, following a slight ridge which was all that remained of a
covered path which had led down from the garrison to the spring below
at the brookside. If she had meant to quench her thirst here, she
changed her mind, and suddenly turned to the right, following the
brook a short distance, and then going straight toward the river
itself and the high uplands, which by daylight were smooth pastures
with here and there a tangled apple-tree or the grassy cellar of a
long vanished farm-house.
It was night now; it was too late in the year for the chirp of any
insects; the moving air, which could hardly be called wind, swept over
in slow waves, and a few dry leaves rustled on an old hawthorn tree
which grew beside the hollow where a house had been, and a low sound
came from the river. The whole country side seemed asleep in the
darkness, but the lonely woman felt no lack of companionship; it was
well suited to her own mood that the world slept and said nothing to
her,--it seemed as if she were the only creature alive.
A little this side of the river shore there was an old burial place, a
primitive spot enough, where the graves were only marked by rough
stones, and the short, sheep-cropped grass was spread over departed
generations of the farmers and their wives and children.
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